Abstract
A discussion is made of the ways in which parity conservation in ordinary strongly interacting nuclear systems might be investigated. Three classes of experiment are proposed: in class I we look for violations of absolute selection rules based on strict parity conservation and are sensitive to , the intensity of the irregular or parity-nonconserving part of the wave functions; in class II we look for longitudinal polarization of product heavy particles or circular polarization of gamma rays from initially unpolarized systems and are here sensitive directly to ; in class III we look for odd powers of in the angular distributions or correlations of radiations emitted from well-isolated nuclear states and are again sensitive to .
An experiment of class I is presented, namely a search for the radiative capture through the 0+ state at 3.56 Mev. It is concluded that the heavy-particle width of this state is zero within a standard deviation of 0.2 ev and that this corresponds to .
- Received 22 October 1957
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.109.1603
©1958 American Physical Society